We haven't even decided what clothes we're bringing on the trip or put any personal items in the RV yet to make it sort of ready to go.
We pushed the launch deadline to Friday the 30th to give us more time, but we didn't sense any relieve from the pressure, it seemed to just make us more busy. We had to ramp up yet again, trying to stay motivated to keep going and get all the chosen necessary and required tasks complete before we left.
Our final session of coaching was Friday the 23rd. We scheduled it to happen here at our house so that we would not lose time traveling to and from her office in Hartford and could continue to work on the house prep items to make it ready for us to leave. Chris had also graciously offered to stay on after our session that afternoon and help paint the upstairs as we got ready to rent out the house while we were gone (thanks Chris). Our coaching sessions culminated Friday with an extended 4 hour session (sorry Chris) where we realized that we still were not any where near finished with the tasks that we had planned to complete and kept finding more of, prior to our departure. 24 full weeks of intense personal coaching, constant reorganization and futzing with the details to try to make them fit into our self imposed, fabricated launch date, countless hours of frustration because they weren't fitting and we couldn't get them too no matter what we did, increasingly regular sessions of bickering about that and then there's the wondering about which one of us was the cause of both the bickering and the delay, led us all the way up to Friday's late night declaration that, we would just sell the f''in RV and be done with this whole crazy idea of taking a year off.The crazy making (also self imposed) and the lack of enjoyment and the complete absence of personal freedom in the preceding months was enough to drive us over the edge and have us throw in the towel. We even talked about taking a break from each other. Like maybe we need to see if we are the problem and not all the details that we had decided were so ultimately important. We subscribe to this philosophy, that if you are doing what is in alignment for you/us, then that is when our life will work the best. So, if that is true how could it be that we were doing the right thing (the trip) and having such a miserable time in the process. There is that saying that the journey is really the trip not the somewhere you are trying to get. If we took that verbatim, to heart, then this journey was not working for us. Our interpretation of this made up truth was very discouraging and disheartening since we had put so much effort into making this boat float.
We spent a couple of hours sitting on and standing around the stairs to the second floor Friday night, beating this thing up and desperately and simultaneously giving up and trying to find out what we were doing wrong because we did not really want to give up (I guess). I talked about my chagrin and concern about not knowing the RV very well at all. And how I was not having much great luck driving it as I have now lightly grazed two different objects on two separate occasions and felt like an idiot both times. Then there was the fact that, at that moment, there was the outstanding issue of there being no power in the coach from the batteries that supply power when we are not plugged into electricity. No lights, no water pump, nothing. The little issue that arose after showing the unit to family and friends after eating the feast Thanksgiving day, that I could not seem to figure out. We talked even more about how we had spent so much of our physical and mental energy making ready that we had just exhausted ourselves in the spin and thus left nothing in the way of time, energy or desire to be with each other for even one more moment in the process. Somewhere in the conversation Megan adamantly stated that she didn't have any attachment to leaving on any particular date, she just wanted to stay until it was all done (all that we said and felt right to have done) before we left. I heard that and felt a twinge shock in my soul. I was not sure if I was mad at her for that or thinking that would be a relief. More likely, I was probably thinking that she was being weak and that we must stick the announced deadline or we would look and feel stupid. Why did I feel it was so important to pick a date a stick it? What was I afraid of or concerned about if we didn't hit the date anyway? At just about the moment when we were at the place of resigning to throw in the towel having been succumbed by the details and absorbed in heaviness, complaint and weariness, Sara and Jasper walked in from having been at the movies.
Although she has been doing great in college academically, Sara has been having her own share of trials and issues living in NYC this past semester. She had left the dorms at the beginning of the year to strike out on her own getting her own autonomy via a room in a shared apartment in Brooklyn in August. After two months that wasn't working for a couple of important reasons. So, she found another apartment where she would have an entire floor to herself and we moved her for the third time this year. Within a month this place wasn't working either due to landlord difficulties and the fact that getting to the city was a very long commute. She was also feeling lonely and disconnected there so she needed our assistance in figuring out how to handle all that she was trying to manage. This was appearing as just one more damn thing for us to attempt to deal with in the midst of an already compacted and screwed up schedule. We all sat down, with the best of attitudes (as you could imagine), very late Friday night in the living room and began listening and debating the best way to handle this. We were there till almost 1 AM.
Right near the end of this conversation and I know this will be hard to believe, I became very frustrated with all of the things that just weren't working. Including the hour of this conversation and the fact that we have tenants moving in on Saturday and now we have to move her on Friday. How can more just keep coming? On top of my/our own, Sara's issues were the icing on the cake. Friday,the 30th, being our rescheduled leave CT date was also coincided with Sara's end of month, have to be out of her apartment date and subsequent have to move again date. I started blowing steam and yelling, "If it's not working then you should just stop. You can't keep trying to force it to work by doing the same thing and complaining over and over again. Change something! Pull out of school for the semester, retract yourself from the city, commute from CT, just do something different to give yourself a fresh perspective and time to deal clearly with what you really want and set it up so that you can be successful." Megan was looking at me like a little bobble head doll that some people put on the dashboard of their car, with her head rotating from side to side. I would find out later that she was listening and wondering if I was talking to myself, us or Sara. The prescription I was spouting to Sara seemed, to Megan, to be what I/we needed to hear and put into practice. Exhausted, we all headed to bed, but not before Sara had a moment of clarity and insight and told us that maybe she should take the semester off as she was not really feeling challenged at her school and look into applying to FIT for the Fall of 08' . We would work on these details in the morning.
When we awoke, we were all pretty beat and morose. Except Sara, who seemed to be on her way to altering her attitude and making changes that fit better. Megan and I had to hustle to get Jasper taken care of so that we could be on a job site by 8 AM. We made it by 9! On the way down though we had our own epiphany. This is when Megan told me that she wondered if I was talking to us or Sara when I said, "Stop what your doing and change something if its not working." Right then, we transported ourselves to the transformational moment of this part of the journey. We were determining that we were beating our heads against the rock that we kept dragging into the room for the express purpose of beating our heads on. I declared, in the next minute, that I would give up trying to force us out of here on any particular date and that I felt in agreement with Megan's previously stated desire of staying until we got it all finished and then we go. We would still have to hold the outside date of being in Florida on the December 29th to pick our kids up at the airport as they arrive to celebrate the holidays with us there. But, we knew that this was very doable since we had kicked our own asses so hard up to this point that we were literally only a week or so away from declaring completion and moving on in the adventure.
The air cleared and we looked at each other as if we were seeing each other anew from the past 6 months and it became very easy to breath again. All of a sudden and just like that, we went from panic about getting things done to seeing that each thing we did got us one step closer. The pressure had evaporated and we were light with each other again and started taking and laughing as we spoke.
The growth moment?
Maybe.
It looked like and felt like surrender to me right up to the very moment of my declaration of the release of the have to date.
Now it just felt like relief and the right move.
DUH!
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